Researchers have announced that a 53-year-old man in Germany is now the fifth person in the world to have been cured of HIV. The “Duesseldorf patient,” as the man is known—to safeguard his identity—is now part of a small global group of people who have been cured of HIV through stem cell transplant, typically performed on cancer patients.
Stem cell transplants are usually performed in cases of cancer when no other treatment option is available or other treatments have failed. This is a high-risk procedure that essentially replaces a person’s immune system. Now, it has proven to be a life-saving (or at least life quality-improving) procedure for at least five HIV patients.
Details of the Duesseldorf patient’s successful treatment first announced in 2019
The details of the Duesseldorf HIV patient’s successful stem cell treatment were first revealed in 2019, but confirmation of his success was only possible five years later.
Indeed, it has been announced that the Duesseldorf patient no longer has any traceable viruses in his system even after stopping his medication almost four years ago.
Dr. Bjorn-Erik Ole Jensen, who presented the details of the case in Nature in Medicine, said, “It’s really cured, and not just, you know, long-term remission.” He added that this is a sign of hope but that there is, of course, still lots of work to do to determine if this could be a viable treatment option for other HIV patients, as well.
For most people, HIV is a lifelong disease, and patients can never entirely recover from it. Despite this, however, people with HIV can live long, healthy lives thanks to significant advancements in modern medicine.
HIV, also known as human immunodeficiency virus, essentially destroys the cells of the infected individual’s immune system. If a person is not properly treated, this can then manifest itself as AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, whereby patients cannot fight off even more minor infections.
Stem cell transplant cannot yet be offered as treatment to HIV patients
Millions of people around the world are HIV patients, and treatments for the disease have come a long way since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
Modern treatment options for the disease are mostly able to keep the virus at bay, and studies for a vaccine are being conducted at various research centers around the world.
The first person to have been cured of HIV was a man by the name of Timothy Ray Brown, whom researchers first referred to as the Berlin patient in 2009. This was then followed by “The London Patient” on whom a study was published in 2019. The two most recent HIV patients to have received stem cell transplants are the City of Hope and the New York patients on whom reports were published in 2022.
The donors of these patients had HIV-resistant mutations, meaning they were natural carriers of a protein known as CCR5, utilized by the HIV virus to enter one’s cells. A mere one percent of the total population carries this genetic mutation that allows for resistance to HIV in the carrier altogether.
Stem cell transplants, however, are still far too risky to offer as the go-to cure for all current HIV patients.
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